If you visit 26th Street and Grand Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri, today, you’ll find an 85-acre spread with office buildings, shops, two big hotels, theaters, and fountains. Nice place.
But in the early 1960s? Total disaster zone. Joyce C. Hall, who founded Hallmark Cards, and his son Donald J. Hall would look out their company windows and see nothing but urban decay.
Parking lots with deep ruts everywhere. Warehouses sit empty with busted windows. Shacks made of tarpaper stuck to a limestone hill covered in old advertising signs…